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Rabat – The French police raids of Elon Musk’s X offices in Paris accompany growing global investigations into the social media platform and its owner. Tuesday’s search is part of an investigation started in January last year regarding accusations of biased algorithms and fraudulent data extraction.
Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of X’s parent company xAI, as well as SpaceX and Tesla and the platform’s former CEO, Linda Yaccarino are summoned to testify in Paris on April 20.
On X, Musk called the raid a “political attack,” and Yaccarino posted that French prosecutors were carrying out “a political vendetta against Americans.”
The platform’s Global Government Affairs team posted on X, “The Paris Public Prosecutor’s office widely publicized the raid — making clear that today’s action was an abusive act of law enforcement theater designed to achieve illegitimate political objectives rather than advance legitimate law enforcement goals.”
“At this stage, the conduct of this investigation is part of a constructive approach, with the aim of ultimately ensuring that the X platform complies with French laws, insofar as it operates on national territory,” the prosecutor’s office said.
The office added that they would be leaving X and all further updates could be found on LinkedIn or Instagram.
Complaints regarding X’s AI tool, Grok and its “complicity” in potential crimes include possessing and sharing pornographic images of minors, defamation of personal image through the creation of explicit “deepfakes,” Holocaust denial, and alleged bias in the content algorithm.
Grok is also being investigated for its creation of sexual deepfake images in regions including the United Kingdom, the EU, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Japan.
Read also: Elon Musk Denies Explicit Image Claims as Grok AI Triggers Worldwide Investigations
Britain’s media regulator Ofcom announced Tuesday that their investigation was ongoing and “a matter of urgency.” The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) launched its own investigation the same day.
“The reports about Grok raise deeply troubling questions about how people’s personal data has been used to generate intimate or sexualised images without their knowledge or consent, and whether the necessary safeguards were put in place to prevent this,” said William Malcolm, the ICO’s executive director for regulatory risk & innovation.
The EU fined X €120 million in December for violating the Digital Services Act, requiring social media companies to manage illegal and harmful content.
The Trump administration responded harshly to the global initiatives with Secretary of State, Marco Rubio calling the fine and other efforts to regulate platforms as “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.”
